Hi Guys,
Thanks a lot for all your responses. Looks like I first have to do a
lot of ground work. Give me some time to do it. I will do it and come
back to you guys.
Thanks once again, especially rgb at duke.
Regards,
Chaitanya.
On 8/25/05, Ed Karns <edkarns at firewirestuff.com> wrote:
>>> On Aug 25, 2005, at 3:39 AM, beowulf-request at beowulf.org wrote:
>>>> ... the resources that I have are these:
>>>>> 1 Intel Pentium 4 3 Ghz Procs 10
>> 2 Intel Mother boards 10
>> 3 200 GB SATA Hard disks 10
>> 4 120 GB IDE Hard disks 10
>> 5 Network cards 10 + 1 (1 extra for master)
>> 6 Some already present switches
>>>>> All the IDE drives will be primary (the OS will reside on this) and
>> the SATA drives will be use as secondary drives for storage)
>>>>> My plan (and requirement) is the following:
>>>>> 1 To get the cluster up and running parallel jobs.
>> 2 The way I intend to do 1 is this. Install the OS (SuSE 9.3 Pro) on
>> the master and install bare-bones ( I am not sure, but may be something
>> like kernel, NFS and/or NIS, SSH, etc) on the rest of the nodes so
>> that I am able to run parallel jobs as well as serial jobs on the
>> nodes. Will require help on this.
>>>>>> Your hardware looks perfectly reasonable for a small cluster. Let's hope
> that your NICs and switches "match" in some way -- enough ports, gigabit
> ports and gigabit cards, whatever. One has to wonder a bit about why the
> nodes have both a 120 GB IDE and 200 GB SATA drive instead of e.g.
> 2x[120,200] GB SATA only. I've never mixed drives like this and would
> expect that it works but would worry that it might do something to
> performance (Mark Hahn usually is the answer man as far as the overall IDE
> drive subsystem is concerned:-).
>>> * Hardware suggestions:
>>>>> Take the "master" off of any alternate network until complete debugging of
> the cluster is accomplished (unplug it, at the least, and remove that
> "alternate" NIC if possible) ... set the whole thing up as a completely
> stand alone cluster until it works as required.
>>>>> I would also wonder about the switches (10/100baseT = :>] or Gigabit
> switches = :>) ?) If two switches, then "balance" the loads = same number
> of CAT5 connections on each switch = 5 & 5 plus jumper, if three switches =
> 3 & 3 & 4 plus jumpers.
>>> All BIOS configurations on all systems should closely match, especially I/O
> port configurations. All NIC (network cards) should match = brand name and
> model type where possible.
>>>>> Although I do not speak from authority on this type of x86 cluster, my best
> guess to increase performance would be to use the SATA drivers completely
> for the OS and cluster work and use the IDE drives for mirroring and backup
> (the exact reverse of your configurations) ... keeping the IDE drives off of
> the cluster if possible ... or even remove the IDE drives from the systems
> and make a RAID array for the cluster network.
>> web-pages
>> * OS and software configurations = Trust Mr. Hearns', DGS' and Mr. Brown's
> suggestions.
>>>>> From John Hearns:
>> " ... You could do worse than to consult Robert Brown's web-pages, Google
> for Brahma and Duke University. Also get a copy of the OReilly book on Linux
> clustering, the latest one. ..."
>>>>> From DGS:
>> " ... You should look into some of the cluster "toolkits". Free ones
> include OSCAR, ROCKS, Warewulf, and oneSIS. My favorite is Warewulf, though
> ROCKS is probably the nearest you can get to a "cluster in a box" for free.
> ..."
>>>>> From Robert Brown:
>> " ... I'm assuming that the NICs are PXE-capable and that you've got a KVM
> setup that you can move from machine to machine somehow to set the BIOS and
> manage at least the initial install. ..."
>>>>>>>> Ed Karns
>> FireWireStuff.com
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--
To err is human, but to really screw up you need a computer.